{T} he popular embrace of hormonal birth control, since its introduction in 1960, has had a profound impact on society by altering the once-standard path of women’s lives. Women have gained a greater ability to choose if and when they will have children — and how many — and are more able to pursue careers on their own timelines.

No clear connection exists between support for the use of hormonal birth control and political or religious beliefs. In a 2022 FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, 93 percent of Republicans and 91 percent of Democrats said that birth-control pills “should be legal in ‘all’ or ‘most’ cases.” Religious belief, in general, does not significantly alter an American’s stance on contraceptive use. According to a 2016 study by Pew Research Center on beliefs about birth-control use, only 4 percent of Protestants and 8 percent of Catholics in the U.S. think using contraceptives is morally wrong.

Needless to say, considering the wide support for legal contraceptives and the near-universal use of birth control, any political move to suppress contraceptives would not be a winning issue in the U.S. Some prominent Republicans, such as former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and Representative Nancy Mace, have argued in favor of the popular position, pushing a new GOP agenda of increased access to contraceptives, particularly by enabling over-the-counter access.

But there is also a novel movement advanced by some female politicians on the (Trump-aligned) right that encourages women to pursue “anti-woke wellness.” By publicizing some of the negative side effects of hormonal birth control, such as depression, anxiety, and weight gain (and touting some questionable theories, such as the notion that a copper IUD can on its own give the user copper poisoning), these women have encouraged their followers to pursue natural methods of family planning, often through a fertility-tracker app backed by like-minded, anti-woke conservative groups. This movement tracks with the surge of “tradwife” content online showcasing and praising all-natural cleaning supplies, seed-oil-free home cooking, and at-home births.

Once it became known to the general media that MAGA women and “tradwives” were pushing natural methods of family planning and childbearing, they faced a backlash. Article after article after article decried the “anti-science” position of the self-described anti-feminists. Contraception was declared a natural right of womankind.

Last year, an article in Slate titled “Birth Control Is Next” sounded the alarm, warning of a “strategy conservatives are embracing in their mounting efforts to restrict contraceptives: fearmongering about their safety, a time-honored entry in the anti-abortion playbook.” The author fretted that “on conservative TikTok and other social media platforms, there has been a recent uptick in disinformation about contraception, often disguised as #wellness content.”

Lost, however, in the political drama was the actual history of birth-control regulation in the U.S. Since the dawn of the pill in the 1960s, many of its loudest critics have been not right-wingers but left-wing feminists.

The foremost 20th-century critic of hormonal birth control, Barbara Seaman (1935–2008), was no conservative. She grew up quite literally in the lap of socialism, as her parents met through the Young People’s Socialist League. She spent her life and career advocating for women’s health, a novel idea in her day. To Seaman, Margaret Sanger was a hero, abortion access was a critical good, and Planned Parenthood was a public servant.

And yet, Seaman’s progressive persuasions did not stop her from criticizing, appropriately, “the pill.” Rather, her belief that women should be at the helm of their own lives, making choices for themselves, inspired her to dedicate her career to unveiling the negative side effects of hormonal birth control. When Seaman first began to shed light on the realities of the pill, it was a drug with much greater risks than in its present forms, and its side effects were largely hidden from the consumer.

Seaman’s fight — through her work as a journalist, public advocate, and author of The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill (1969) — helped remove the most potentially dangerous forms of the pill from the market. Her work also contributed to the federal requirement that medications publicly list their potential side effects and that doctors report any negative side effects of the medications taken by their patients.

In “The Pill and I: 40 Years On, the Relationship Remains Wary,” a retrospective that Seaman wrote for the New York Times in 2000, she voiced her continued skepticism of the drug:

If my daughters had wanted to go on the Pill, I might have cried. Now, if my grand-daughters should choose it, I guess I can live with that. But even as the Pill gets safer, some troubling questions remain. The jury, in my opinion, is still out on the relationship of the Pill to breast cancer, infertility and high blood pressure, and we are only beginning to learn about some of its toxic interactions with other common drugs, like some antidepressants.

A recent documentary, The Business of Birth Control ­(2021), cites Seaman’s work in bringing the pill’s potential risks to the public’s attention. The film, which was directed by Abby Epstein and produced by her and Ricki Lake — both women who are decidedly left of center — takes an alarmist stance against the nonchalant, ubiquitous use of hormonal birth control.

The documentary presents an argument, entirely in progressive language, as to why women should take a more questioning approach to hormonal birth control.

For an example of the film’s political leanings, it opens with the following disclaimer: “The filmmakers want to acknowledge the use of gendered language throughout this documentary. While menstruation is experienced across the gender binary, the film itself specifically focuses on the historical and lived experiences of cis-women who menstruate. The emphasis on this narrative is not an intentional erasure of the men and nonbinary folks around the world who also experience menstruation.”

Despite such homage paid to the gods of woke, Rolling Stone still ripped into the filmmakers for promoting “a brand of anti-birth control rhetoric [that] could be weaponized by the right.” The stated mission of the film, while undeniably alarmist in outlook and tone, is to offer women information so that they can make fully informed choices regarding the drugs they take.

Sarah E. Hill, a psychology professor at Texas Christian University, embarked on a similar mission with her book, This Is Your Brain on Birth Control (2019). Given her TCU affiliation, one might assume that Hill is a conservative Christian fighting against the spread of the pill. But in fact, Hill is a pro-abortion atheist who saw that the negative side effects of hormonal birth control are underdiscussed by doctors and patients.

The Guardian introduced an interview of Hill by noting, “At a time when women’s reproductive freedoms are under attack, any suggestion that the birth control pill could be problematic feels explosive.”

In our current political climate, the media cast women who criticize hormonal birth control — regardless of their party affiliations or progressive bona fides — as fearmongering quacks or right-wing extremists. As I wrote previously on this subject, modern birth-control pills are not especially dangerous, but they can, like any other medication, have negative side effects. It ought not to be explosive to explore this issue. Providing information to ensure women’s health has been, and should still be, a universal concern, regardless of the political landscape.